God's Calling - Isaiah Take Two

 

This week we have gone with Isaiah across the threshold into the Temple, to sit in the pews and honestly name/notice our expectations.  I pray yesterday you spent time with your own expectations. I hope you read Isaiah 6 and I invite you to re-read the passage today, especially verse 5.    Here is the deeper (harder to comprehend truth), our expectations shift subtly and swiftly in our lives.  One day I can expect one thing from my family and the next day there might be something different I want/need/hope for.  To be sure, there are expectations that are constant.  But there is, like the wind swirling from different directions, changes that happen with the expectations we cart and carry around.

 

This can be difficult and demanding of us.  I love how Isaiah is honest and heartfelt at how overwhelmed he feels.  Inside the temple, after God’s robe filled the whole space, wrapping Isaiah in the warmth of a blanket-like hug.  After the choir anthem of angels singing, “Holy, holy, holy.”  Isaiah’s response in verse 5 is…

 

“Woe is me.  I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.” 

 

Ever felt that way?  I mean besides the days that end in “y”?

 

Those words are a powerful and profound today as they were when they first fell from Isaiah’s mouth.  I hear this response and they are so timely.  We swim in a sea of words that discounts and discriminates and create divisiveness.  Every day we consume (and I believe are consumed by) such negativity.  It is said today the options are you either double down or burn it down.  It isn’t just that compromise is no longer in fashion among any leader, it is that admitting mistakes is somehow a mortal sin.  Here is Isaiah wrapped in the Holy and his first response is not to feel his heart strangely warmed but to sense his own bumbling and stumbling shadow self.  He confesses his brokenness.  Is that ever our expectation? 

 

This is an important truth in our calling: we will at times feel a strong sense of imposture syndrome.  We might have this nagging, needling feeling like we are messing it up.  Sure we can put on a brave, bold face.  We can act capable, confident, and certain even when what we say doesn’t match what is happening.

 

I invite us today to push pause on this point.  How might the Holy be hovering and humming in your midst helping you name the ways you feel overwhelmed?  How can being in God’s presence enable and empower us to honestly wonder if that criticism someone just said might be truer than we want to admit?  Or how your criticism of another might be revealing a shadow side within your shy soul?

 

Isaiah was honest about his own inadequacy, perhaps part of calling is for us to do the same.  May this part of Scripture speak and sing to our hearts today knowing that you are loved not because you are perfectly polished and have “it” all put together.  You are loved.  Period.  God’s love is unconditional and unceasing.  God’s love is.  May that truth evoke and provoke your shy soul and whole life to open up.  Amen.